Friday, 9 October 2009

Laws

The political parties have had their get togethers and rattled sabres muchly. They've talked of "vision" and "character" and "challenge" with little detail of content. Except the Conservatives, to their enormous credit, who've shared specific policy details. Having endured Thatcher's Britain I'd never have imagined I'd see anything the Conservatives did as laudable; plus ca change.

Government govern through making laws. We have lots of laws. About time someone, instead of just generating loads of edicts, starting doing away with 'em and pulling back to what's necessary.

In this notion of laws, and the desire to be explicit about laws (rather than just posture and waffle) and to have the minimum amount of law that's necessary, how does that translate to mental health? Well, I'm glad you asked. In 1978 we gratefully received the work of Shem, The House of God, a book dressed with humour as a vehicle for the grim themes explored, which sadly resonates with an awful lot of truth in it. The tale is of a keen junior doctor, who's first year as a doctor is damaging to both him and his colleagues and his patients. Having finished medical school and entered hospital practice, his up beat mentor schools his to survive in the really real world through breaking rules and instead using his own rules.

The House of God gave us 13 laws.

In his sequel, Shem offers us insight into progress as a trainee in psychiatry. With the book come new laws. The 13 laws of psychiatry in Mount Misery are as follows :I. There are no laws in psychiatry. II. Psychiatrists specialise in their own defects. III. At a psychiatric emergency, the first procedure is to check your own mental status. IV. The patient is not the only one with the disease, or without it. V. In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis. VI. The worst psychiatrists charge the most, and world experts are the worst. VII. Medical school is a liability in becoming a psycho therapist. VIII. Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients. IX. You can learn everything about a person by the way he or she plays a sport. X. Medical patients don't take their medication fifty percent of the time, and psychiatric patients don't take their medication much at all. XI. Therapy is part of life, and vice versa. XII. Healing in psychotherapy has nothing to do with psychology; connection, not self, heals. XIII. The delivery of psychiatric care is to know as little as possible, and to understand as much as possible, about living through sorrows with others.

What do you think of these laws? Better than HMG suggest, worse than the opposition are proposing, relevant to mental health work? Discuss.

Why Lake Cocytus?

Dante's "Inferno" takes us on a journey through to the deepest layer of Hell, passing down through layers of fire. Within this Ninth Layer there is no flame, there is a lake of ice. Imprisoned within this are the those of greatest evil, those of greatest betrayal. Rather a puzzle to me, this one. Is it a terrible place, manifesting evil incarnate? Or is Lake Cocytus a good thing, containing the world's greatest evils?

Good or evil this place, this Lake Cocytus, is my space to entomb the thoughts and musings best interred in ice.

"Because love is not sex or a shared faith, or the 'joint maintenance of a household and the upbringing of children'."
- Sergei Lukyanenko

"Look at that. Look at that. "Accident Blackspot"? These aren't accidents. They're throwing themselves into the road gladly. Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness."
- Withnail & I

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."
- Aneurin Bevan